"968"

With families brought together for the holidays, we’re naturally drawn to evergreen movies that light up a room, the house, and the season, their very familiarity part of the aura of comfort and joy. These movies are the favorites we love to gather around, which only get better with repeat viewings.

This time of year, it’s wonderful to spend time with loved ones we don’t often get to see, both friends and family. This welcome scenario still involves an unusual amount of “interrelating,” since there’s always so much catching up to do. To get a respite from all that stimulating talk, nothing beats a great, crowd-pleasing movie.

An opening scene of a movie is like a cinematic thermometer. You take a movie’s temperature by that first scene. It holds you, intrigues you, grabs you — or it doesn’t. Though it’s true that plenty of great movies take their time building up our involvement, obviously they can’t take too long. Then there are those others that start off with a bang. It’s this latter group we’re celebrating today. Here are fifteen of our favorite movie openers, covering seven decades of filmmaking: